I soon recognized the reason for the matriarchy I had observed among West Indians back home. The women here were harder-working, more disciplined. They set the standards, raised the kids, and drove them ahead. And some of the menfolk were not considered quite presentable. I had met all my aunts but fewer uncles. One day, I was driving through Kingston with my cousin Vernon Meikle, on the way to visit Aunt Ethlyn and Uncle Witte. Vernon slowed at a light and pointed to a man standing on a corner. “That’s your Uncle Rupee,” Vernon said.
“I want to meet him,” I answered.
“Can’t,” Vernon said.
“Why not?” I wanted to know. Rupee, it seemed, was the black sheep of the McKoys. Too many girlfriends and no visible means of support. I insisted that we bring Uncle Rupee along. After all, he was my mother’s brother.
Vernon proved right. Aunt Ethlyn was not happy. But I was fascinated. In this clan of characters, Uncle Rupee turned out to be a particularly lovable rogue, willing to keep up his stories as long as I was willing to underwrite his rum consumption, my money and his stories lasting three days. I spent the last two days of my leave back in Queens getting rid of a headache, and then returned to Fort Devens.
By the summer of 1961, I could have left the Army, since my obligated three years of service were over. The thought never entered my head. I was a young black. I did not know anything but soldiering. What was I going to do, work with my father in the garment district? As a geology major, go drilling for oil in Oklahoma? The country was in a recession; if I stayed in the Army, I would soon be earning $360 a month, a magnificent $4,320 a year. I was in a profession that would allow me to go as far as my talents would take me. And for a black, no other avenue in American society offered so much opportunity. But nothing counted so much as the fact that I loved what I was doing. And so, much to my family’s bewilderment, I told them that I was not coming home.
A certain ambivalence has always existed among African-Americans about military service. Why should we fight for a country that, for so long, did not fight for us, that in fact denied us our fundamental rights? How could we serve a country where we could not even be served in a restaurant and enjoy the ordinary amenities available to white Americans? Still, whether valued or scorned, welcomed or tolerated, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans have served this country from its beginning. In Massachusetts, where I was now serving, blacks, free and slave, were inducted into the militia as far back as 1652. During the Revolution, over 5,000 blacks served under General Washington, helping the country gain an independence that they themselves did not enjoy. Nearly 220,000 blacks served in the Union ranks during the Civil War; 37,500 of them died. Blacks were emancipated, but they still returned home to suffer bigotry, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and lynchings.
After the Civil War, Congress authorized four colored regiments, the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry. They became known as the “Buffalo Soldiers,” so called by the Indians, according to legend, because of their dark skin, kinky hair, buffalo-pelt coats, and courage in battle. The creation of these regiments, however, was no act of racial enlightenment. Washington merely wanted white settlers protected from the Indians as the West was settled. The Buffalo Soldiers were to help white folks acquire and defend land that blacks, for the most part, were not allowed to own.
You can search the paintings of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War and you will not find a single black face portrayed. A camera, however, would have recorded them, because they were there. Seven of them were awarded the Medal of Honor in Cuba. In World War II, nearly a million blacks wore the uniform. Some, like the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black fighter pilots, proved that no mission was beyond the skills or courage of black men. Still, these black GIs came home in 1945 to Jim Crow in the South, to separate but unequal schools and colleges, to poor job prospects, and to demeaning restrictions like separate toilets and water fountains for the “colored.” Racism in much of the rest of the country was only less blatant in degree.
Why have blacks, nevertheless, always answered the nation’s call? They have done so to exercise their rights as citizens in the one area where it was permitted. They did it because they believed that if they demonstrated equal courage and equal sacrifice in fighting and dying for their country, then equality of opportunity surely must follow. General Andrew Jackson, for example, promised to give land to blacks who fought with him, particularly at the Battle of New Orleans. They fought and some died. But when the shooting stopped and the danger had passed, they got nothing.
Not until July 26, 1948, did President Harry S Truman sign the executive order ending segregation in the armed forces. If black American soldiers were to be allowed to die equally for their country, they would finally be permitted to serve equally in the military. I entered the Army only ten years after that historic turning point. I still remember two of my closest friends in the Infantry Officers Basic Course at Fort Benning, Don Phillips and Herman Price, the three of us standing next to each other at muster, in alphabetical order, looking as if the Army were still segregated. Phillips eventually made full colonel and became the first black to command the Army’s Honor Guard Regiment in Washington. Price went into medicine and became the Army’s chief cardiologist. Their careers, and that of other black officers, like Ranger Coffey, who became military aide to President Richard M. Nixon, benefited from a fact that gets too little recognition. The Army was living the democratic ideal ahead of the rest of America. Beginning in the fifties, less discrimination, a truer merit system, and leveler playing fields existed inside the gates of our military posts than in any Southern city hall or Northern corporation. The Army, therefore, made it easier for me to love my country, with all its flaws, and to serve her with all my heart.
Three
Courting Alma
ONE NOVEMBER DAY IN 1961 I WAS STRETCHED OUT IN MY ROOM AT THE bachelor officers’ quarters at Fort Devens when a friend, Michael Heningburg, popped in to ask me for a buddy-in-a-pinch favor. Mike was also from Queens and had a background about as mixed as my own. The Heningburgs were a black family with a German strain; Mike’s father was named Alfonse and his brother was Gustav. Mike had met a girl in Boston, Jackie Fields, and had flipped over her. “I’m asking you to go into town with me to pick off her roommate,” he pleaded.
“A blind date?” I asked warily. Mike nodded. I had never been on a blind date. The odds of success seemed better in the numbers racket. Yet, my relationship with my girlfriend in New York had not survived the sixteen-month separation, and I was at loose ends. I had plenty of friends at Devens, Tony DePace and his wife, Sandy, from my Pershing Rifles days, Herman and Madeline Price from Fort Benning, and new friends, Costelle “Coz” Walker and Ezra “Chopper” Cummings among them. But as far as romance, I was on the inactive list. “Okay, Mike,” I said. “I’ll run interference for you.”
We drove to the Back Bay section of Boston to pick up the girls at 372 Marlborough Street. We were buzzed into a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor in the rear of a brownstone. Jackie Fields greeted us, and a few minutes later, the other girl emerged. “This is my roommate, Alma Johnson,” Jackie said.
She was fair-skinned, with light brown hair and a lovely figure. I was mesmerized by a pair of luminous eyes, an unusual shade of green. Miss Johnson moved gracefully and spoke graciously, with a soft Southern accent. This blind date might just work out.
Long afterward, Alma gave me her version of that first meeting. “I had had an argument with my roommate for getting me involved,” she told me. “I do not go on blind dates,” Alma had told Jackie. “And I definitely don’t go on blind dates with soldiers. How do I know who’s going to walk through that door?” Alma had worked off her annoyance by dressing up weirdly and piling on makeup to put off the unknown suitor when he arrived. But when she peeked into the room, she was surprised, she said, to see a shy, almost baby-faced guy, his cheeks rosy from the cold. She was used to d
ating men four or five years older. “You looked like a little lost twelve-year-old,” she later told me. She had then disappeared into the bathroom to change her clothes, redo her face, and unvamp herself.
We took the girls out to a club in the Dorchester section. We had a few drinks, listened to music, and talked. After almost exclusive exposure to girls with New Yawky voices, I was much taken by this soft-spoken Southerner. And Alma did talk, most of the evening, while I listened entranced. At one point, she put a question to me natural enough in that era of compulsory military service: How much time did I have left in the Army? Young men she knew went into the service and got out as soon as possible; they could practically tell you how many minutes they still had to serve. I was not getting out, I told her; I was career military. She looked at me as if I were an exotic specimen.
Finally, the most enjoyable night I had had in ages came to an end, and Mike and I drove back to Fort Devens. I called Alma the next day and asked her out again.
We began to see each other regularly, and the more I saw, the more I liked. Alma Johnson had been born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father, Robert C. “R.C.” Johnson, was principal of Parker High School, one of the city’s two black high schools. Her uncle, George Bell, was principal of Ulman, the other black high school. Mildred Johnson, Alma’s mother, was a pioneer in black Girl Scouting and a national leader in the Congregational Church. Alma had skipped grades in school and graduated from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of nineteen. She went back home after graduation and had her own radio program for a while, Luncheon with Alma, on which she dispensed household hints and played music, mostly the rhythm and blues that the station management wanted. But when Alma substituted for a nighttime disc jockey, she got to play her kind of music, progressive jazz.
Alma had never liked her hometown. It was not so much the institutionalized racism of Birmingham. Actually, as R. C. Johnson’s daughter, she led something of a privileged life. But Alma had an adventurous spirit; she found Birmingham stifling and wanted to see more of the world. And so she had moved to Boston to do graduate work in audiology at Emerson College. When I met her, Alma was an audiologist for the Boston Guild for the Hard of Hearing, driving a mobile van all over the area giving people hearing tests. Her greatest coup was getting inside a monastery in Cambridge to test the Jesuits’ hearing.
About a month after we met, Alma went home to Birmingham for Christmas. We worked it out so that she would return via New York to meet my folks at a New Year’s Eve party on Elmira Avenue. I was sure Alma would love my relatives—but maybe not immediately. A well-bred girl from a proper Southern family needed to be exposed gradually to nosy, noisy, fun-loving West Indians.
The party was going to be held in our basement family room. Vinyl tiles hid the concrete floor. The walls and ceiling were covered in hideous brown cork panels. A tiny bar stood in one corner, barely big enough to hold the glasses, bottles, and bartender. Coconuts carved in the form of pirates’ heads hung over the bar. President Roosevelt’s picture had been transported from the Bronx and now occupied a place of honor behind the bar. Benches lined the walls, and in one corner were two tourist-class seats that my Pershing Rifles friends and I had rescued from an abandoned El Al plane at Idlewild (now Kennedy) Airport.
By the time Alma and I arrived, the place was jammed with my relatives, dancing, laughing, drinking, eating, singing, and still talking about “goin’ home.” Food kept pouring down from the kitchen and a stack of 78-rpm calypso records ran nonstop on a record player that Pop had bought my sister, Marilyn, for her sweet sixteen party.
I escorted Alma into this joyous chaos, where Pop was presiding as sublimely as Don Corleone at his daughter’s wedding in The Godfather. He and Mom warmly embraced Alma and then started introducing her around the room, from aunt to uncle to cousin, giving everybody a close look.
Alma managed to survive the first round. The acid test came when she sat down in one of the El Al seats to catch her breath. Aunt Beryl, my father’s sister, circled in for the kill. Aunt Beryl had no children of her own and compensated by doting on her nephews and nieces, of which I was the chosen, her “Col-Col.” In Aunt Beryl’s eyes, Alma started out with serious handicaps. She was not Jamaican, not even West Indian, and not from New York. Beryl planted herself next to Alma and eyed her up and down, wordlessly. The guests pretended to keep partying but watched Aunt Beryl out of the corners of their eyes. Alma finally got up. Aunt Beryl got up. Alma moved two steps. Beryl moved two steps. Every time Alma turned around, there was my aunt at her shoulder, her face scrunched in skepticism. Still, she never said a word.
At long last, Aunt Beryl drifted away and began talking to the other relatives. Alma could breathe again. Col-Col, Aunt Beryl told the folks, was going to be twenty-five soon, marrying age. The family could not wait forever. The courtship could proceed, even if the poor child was not Jamaican. I did not know it was a courtship. I just thought I had a new girlfriend and we were dating. What an idiot.
Back in Massachusetts, Alma began coming by bus to Fort Devens on weekends to visit me. We hung out with my bachelor pals in the Club Rathskeller eating cheeseburgers, and spent the rest of the time visiting my married friends. Alma met the Prices, the Abernathys, the Ellisons, and the DePaces, and she began to get a picture of Army life beyond that of draftees aching to get out. And, as a black Southerner, she was struck by the social integration among Army couples. She fitted in from the start, getting along with the wives of my seniors through her appealing combination of deference and independence, as if she were born to the game.
Alma and I soon became inseparable. I could not wait for Saturday inspections to end so that we could be together. I was oblivious to what was happening. I was in love, but I thought it would clear up.
Chubby Checker and the twist were all the rage in those days, but dancing had never been my strong suit. I was good enough at calypsos if sufficiently lubricated, and I could stumble through the lindy, merengue, and cha-cha. Jamaican miscegenation, however, had blocked passage of both the basketball and the dance genes in me. Nevertheless, when you are not white and have kinky hair, certain things are expected of you. Alma did a mean twist and tutored me until I became an acceptable twister.
By the summer of 1962, I had been at Fort Devens for eighteen months and was due for orders. They arrived in August; I was going to South Vietnam. I knew little about the country, except that President Kennedy had sent a few thousand men there as advisors. Scattered reports had filtered back from the first batch. We were involved in something called “nation-building,” trying to help South Vietnam save itself from the Red Menace that stretched from the Berlin Wall (thrown up the year before) to the rice paddies of Southeast Asia. I was excited; I was going to war.
Of course, I felt some anxiety. A test pilot is anxious before a flight. So is a soloist before a concert or a quarterback before the kickoff. But we are eager to do the thing we have spent our lives preparing for, and I was a soldier. I became the envy of my fellow career officers, since those picked to go as advisors to South Vietnam were regarded as comers, walk-on-water types being groomed for bright futures. I was to report to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the fall for a five-week course as a military advisor. And I could expect to be promoted to captain before being shipped out.
I eagerly called my parents and friends. And then I called Alma. I sensed that she did not share my enthusiasm. I drove to Boston to explain to her why this was good news. I was going off to practice my profession in earnest. When that failed to register, I mentioned the upcoming promotion. All Alma wanted to know was what my orders meant for us. I told her that the Vietnam assignment was for one year, and that I had no idea where I would be sent afterward. I told her that I cared deeply for her, and I hoped she would write me often. Her reply floored me: “I’m not going to write to you.” If she was going to be only a pen pal, she said, “we might as well end it now.” She was almost twenty-five, Alma went on, and she had
no intention of sitting around waiting to see if I was still in the picture a year from now.
I drove back to Devens dejected. Her reaction forced me to ask myself something I had not faced so far. How much did this woman mean to me?
That night, I lay in my bunk taking emotional inventory of the relationship. Alma Johnson was beautiful, intelligent, refined, and fun to be with, and, all too rare in a romance, she was my friend. She came from a fine family, got along with my circle of friends, and was even a great cook. I knew that she loved me, and I loved her. My folks loved her too. What was I waiting for? Alma had everything I would ever want in a wife. I was a jerk for not acting before she got away. This nonsense that if the Army wanted you to have a wife it would have issued you one had to go.
I could barely wait to drive back to Boston the next day and ask her to marry me. Thank God, she said yes.
Alma must have loved me, because I was not a romantic suitor. I did not even buy her an engagement ring. I told her that we would be better off spending the money on household items. Alma had already gone through one engagement with a ring and the works, and it had not turned out well. She was wise enough to know that the trappings tell little about success in marriage. “Don’t worry about the ring,” she told me. “You can make it up to me later.” Which I eventually did, with a fairly nice rock.
When we called my parents to tell them we were getting married, they sounded relieved. Alma called her folks too. I had met her mother, Mildred, who seemed to approve of me. But I had yet to meet R.C., who sounded formidable. Alma told me that her father had never found any of her beaus good enough. When they came to the Johnson home, R.C. would give them the silent treatment.
My American Journey Page 9